Month: December 2017

This week I started working on metadata for the Chaffey
Brothers Letters. It seems like I am the last CLIR CCEPS Fellow to work on the
Chaffey Brothers Letters, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay away from the
Chaffey brothers for long. Other fellows have written about the Chaffey
Brothers Letters many times before. They have inspired a lot of conversations
here at Special Collections, and Alfonso even did his culminating presentation
on the letters.

The infamy of the Chaffey Brothers Letters here at the
CLIRWater Project is due to two factors. One is simply that there are a lot of
letters which gives an enormously well-rounded view of their business
operations. We are very lucky that these fragile records have survived almost
150 years and that complete transcripts exist in the case that the wet copy
letters are illegible. Complete or near complete records like these can provide
huge insights for researchers interested in the Chaffey brothers or the history
of land use in Southern California.

This brings us to the second reason that the Chaffey Brother
Letters are such a hot topic here at the Claremont Colleges Library’s Special Collections:
the Chaffey brothers are incredibly important to the history of Southern
California and the Inland Empire specifically. They influenced the settlement
of the area and effected water and land use in the area to such an extent that
their legacy can be seen even today. Since our project centers on water
resources and allocation, the Chaffey brothers are big players in the larger
narrative that we are uncovering and publishing via the CLIRWater Project.

Now that I am creating metadata for some of the letters, I
am beginning to understand why the Chaffey Brothers Letters are so captivating.
Although most of the letters are short and center around specific business
transactions, when read together a larger image of the Chaffey brother’s
business comes into focus. I have talked about learning history through osmosis
before, and I am experiencing this sensation again while working with these
letters.

Anyway, this is my last blog post for 2017. I will be back
again working on the CLIRWater Project in 2018. Happy Holidays!

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Hi all,

This week I continued my work on naming files from Chaffey letters book 2. I also got to see some documents being photographed and uploaded, which was cool because it showed me the earlier steps in the process of archiving these files. I’m learning more about the Chaffey brothers’ business as I go; for example, I found this week that they were involved in growing raisins through a letter in which they requested someone send them an “A-1 raisin man” immediately!

Happy holidays,
Aalia

A couple weeks ago I posted a blog post about the CLIR CCEPS culminating presentation that I was getting ready for. Well, last week I gave my presentation along side my fellow CLIR CCEPS student workers. The presentations all went really well and I enjoyed sharing my thoughts with the folks in the audience.

For this blog post I wanted to share briefly what my presentation was about. Given my experience and interest in developing the CLIRWater project’s social media presence, my presentation was about social media. More specifically, I talked about how social media might be able to support the mission statements of the stakeholders involved in the project.

First, I talked about the successes and failures we’ve experienced over the last semester in terms of what works and what doesn’t for our followers on different social media platforms. I believe that success and failure are both important to recognize so that we can learn and adapt accordingly. This process is about trying new things without the fear of failure, because failure is just another kind of learning opportunity. Likewise, recognizing success offers important lessons about what we can continue to do well.

I used Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as my case studies. I examined posts across all three social media platforms featuring the images seen in this slide, and noticed what was popular and what was not. From there I established guidelines about how we can proceed in future social media posts based on the lessons I learned from these case studies.

I then looked at the mission statements for the organizations involved in the CLIRWater Project. My goal was to connect the online content we create with the goals and values of the organizations involved. I wanted to make sure that posting online content to social media platforms was a worthwhile aspect of this project outside of the normal activities that this project entails (and that we post about here on the blog).

Finally, I connected some of the key ideas found in the mission statements listed above to the online content we create. I sincerely think that social media is a great resource for sharing archival and special collections material and engaging a larger audience. Hopefully this abridged version of my culminating presentation has convinced you too!

Hi everyone,

This week I worked on naming files from the second book of Chaffey letters.

In a few of the letters from Book 2 that
I got to skim, I came across some business issues the Chaffey
brothers had to deal with. A common theme was that
the person they were writing to wasn’t writing back to them in time. The
brothers were dealing with pressing issues at times, but the speed of the postal service (and potentially the reluctance of their business partners to
answer) meant they didn’t always get a response when they needed one. For
example, in the file ont00017_0103_0002, George Chaffey wrote about rabbits
doing damage to trees on their land, and how the person he was addressing had
left his letter unanswered. This made me think of how nowadays we are
accustomed to instant responses, and if we don’t get them, we can often check
whether or not our messages have been received or even opened. People are also
expected to be accessible at any time because our cell phones are never too far
from us. This has changed business practices and customs so much. It was
interesting to read how it used to be in the 1800s, and how all the Chaffey
brothers could do to ensure a faster response was to perhaps insert some stern
words into their requests.

Speaking of the digital age, I also worked on posting to CLIR and Honnold’s social media pages today!

Best,
Aalia

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Hello! I have some pretty amazing news! At this point in the
semester I have now created metadata for all of the items I scanned this
semester. After hours and hours of work I’m done with my first batch of
objects! Once they have all been uploaded onto the digital library I will start
scanning again.

Things have come full circle, officially, which is such an
incredible realization. I actually had trouble thinking of a blog post topic
for this week until I realized I’ve finally seen the process from start to
finish. I guess I have to stop feeling like a newbie now.

I’m excited to start scanning again, something you probably
didn’t expect to read. However, new documents to scan equals new stories to
uncover and I can’t wait to share what new treasures I discover.

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Hi all,

This week I worked on converting PDF scans of the Chaffey Letters Book 1 into archivable PDFs, or PDF/As. I did a little research into why it’s necessary for these files to be in the PDF/A format and found that this allows them to be preserved more carefully so that they remain accessible. It’s used by governments, newspapers, libraries, and many more institutions as the world’s information becomes more and more digitized. So, although the work was tedious, it ensured that the Chaffey letters meet the standards for digital archiving.

Happy December,
Aalia

Hello everyone,

So today is my last day working as a CLIRWater CCEPS Fellow. For the past two days I have been working on my presentation displaying the work I’ve done this semester as well as continuing metadata for those Chaffey Letters. It might be a surprise, but my end of the semester presentation is going to be on… drum rolls please..

The Chaffey Letters!!

I’ve spent so much time with these letters and learning about the Chaffey Brothers, the Inland Empire and Ontario that I’m just waiting to burst with all that information.

Overall, I am thankful for the experience I have had at the library. I have always considered myself a history buff and while working with these documents I have enjoyed learning about the history of Southern California as well as the ability to work with archives. I’ve learned new skills, technical and job skills.

thanks for reading,

Alfonso